October 2011
Perhaps distance is the only way of thinking about Feininger’s art…

Sunset at Deep (Sunset), Lyonel Feininger, 1930 From The Smart Set: It is difficult to look at a painting such as “Sunset at Deep” (1930) — which captures the stillness of the seaside moment in geometrical shapes, the white blazing sun low and strong on the rectangle of water...
Read MoreDear National Geographic

by Tamar Rothenberg American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination, by Stephanie L. Hawkins, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 264 pp. What is iconic about National Geographic? From the ethnographic “types” displayed as such in the first half of the twentieth century, to the bare-breasted women...
Read More‘Five percent growth, five brownie points’

In Iceland the politicians promised to deliver 30 terrawatt hours of energy in an environmentally sustainable manner. So everyone immediately thinks, oh, that is scientific, rational and probably true.
Read MoreReverse Evolution

From Jurassic Park, Universal Pictures, 1993 From Wired: People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at...
Read MoreMark Bevir: Marxism, Fabianism, Ethical Socialism

England to Her Own Rescue, Walter Crane, 1884 by Mark Bevir “We Are All Socialists Now: The Perils and Promise of the New Era of Big Government” ran a provocative cover of Newsweek on 11 February 2009. The financial crisis had swept through the economy, and the state had...
Read MoreHackersklasse

From Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Production I.G, 2002 From SKOR: Any work, of art, of writing, in any media, if it is in the least bit interesting, becomes at some point an adventure. Usually, the adventure happens in the making, before the work is finished. “The...
Read MoreSATAN, n.

Satan’s Treasures, Jean Delville,1895 From The Smart Set: There’s a connection between the Devil and the word that goes back to the original Greek diábolos, which means “slanderer” or “accuser.” Bierce knew all too well the demons that lurk in our language. He wrote that the cynic sees things...
Read MoreDemand/Duration

#occupywallstreet general assembly, Zuccotti Park, New York From Harper’s: The nightly meetings of the General Assembly at occupied Liberty Plaza (officially, Zuccotti Park) in New York have been treated by the media mainly as a quaint footnote to the mass arrests and alleged police brutality attendant to the occupation....
Read More‘A dancing pine tree, a surfacing sea monster, a wife splitting into sixteen pieces and reassembling’

From The Times Literary Supplement: Sometimes a person’s most fleeting glance, a throwaway comment, or simply their presence, can become fixed with significance, freeze-framed in the memory like a panel in a comic, there to revisit and linger over. The visual and verbal registers of graphic novels seem well...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read More